Get Into a Back-to-School Mindset With Advice From 12 Youth Soccer Coaches

Late summer is always the hardest on parents. The pool days are numbered. The long evenings are shortening. The school year is coming, and it doesn’t care how ready you are. The back-to-school transition is never the clean handoff the calendar makes it look like. Every August, we tell ourselves this year will be different. You’ll get ahead of it. Lunch prep sorted by Sunday. Bedtime routine locked in a week early. Screen-time rules clearly communicated and actually enforced. You’ll draw up this plan with the kind of granular, paranoid attention to detail that Guardiola brings to a cup final. But then, it’s all a disaster by Tuesday. If you’re looking for an actual strategy that holds up, go to the park on a Saturday morning, find the sideline, and start listening to whoever is coaching. These are people managing every extreme of human emotion — low blood sugar, wounded pride, full-on existential crises — all while trying to stop a five-way argument over who gets the neon green goalie pinnies. If they don’t know something useful, nobody does. So we hit up a dozen youth soccer coaches for their best back-to-school advice. 1. Do The Thing You Hate SrdjanPav/E+/Getty Images I tell my girls this on the first day of every season, and I mean it every time. Some days we’re doing your favorite thing. Some days we’re doing the thing you hate. The thing you hate is usually the thing that needs work. That’s not a coincidence. I don’t let them skip the hard drills because they don’t feel …